The Wounds in the Walls

by Heidi Cullinan

  But then Pete turned to Mike, his eyes going dark again, the whites disappearing as they had before. He motioned Mike closer.

  “You get over here too,” he called, his voice rough and heavy with lust. “Get that monster of yours out and see if you can fit that bad boy down my throat.”

  Mike knew he should resist. He could feel the words of refusal in his throat, could taste them in his mouth. Rational arguments and scholarship tried to rise up, but they couldn’t get through. Because Mike looked at Pete’s mouth, lush and swollen from Ara’s kisses, and all he could think of was what it would look like with his cock pushing in and out of it.

  He should try to force reason into this, he knew. But he couldn’t. All he could do was rise, head aching, and crawl across the room to Pete, and as he watched Ara bend Pete’s legs back and steady himself as he dipped his head to take Pete’s cock into his mouth, Mike undid his pants, pulled out his sex, and fed it to Pete as instructed.

  Chapter Four

  Pete and Peter

  As Clarke’s thick cock slid into his mouth and Ara spread his thighs and suckled him, Pete let go of the last of his tension and let the pleasure of his attendants course through him.

  Goddamn, but he felt alive.

  It wasn’t just that Pete had never had sex quite like this, either. It wasn’t that Ara was a ghost, though that was decidedly a first. Pete had been with two guys before, and it had been good, but it had been nothing like this. Pete didn’t know what this was that he’d gotten into, but whatever it was, it was intense.

  He was a mellow guy. He worked, but not too hard. He did nothing to excess, but he didn’t withhold himself on principle, either. He would fuck or be fucked. He would drink or not drink. He would stay home or go out. In general, Pete found that much of life made no difference to him one way or the other. Sometimes life was good, and sometimes it wasn’t so much, but overall everything was no big deal.

  He did not feel that way right now. Clarke was fucking his mouth, and Pete loved the fact that the man didn’t want to and yet couldn’t seem to help himself. He loved seeing that professional distance crumble. And he loved the slick, smooth taste of Clarke on his tongue. He loved the sweaty smell of his groin as it thrust against Pete’s nose. He liked the way Clarke groaned and grabbed at Pete’s hair, holding on tight as he gave in and fucked Pete’s mouth with abandon.

  Below, Ara was taking him in deep as well. His hands weren’t half as cold now, but they were still cool against Pete’s thighs, which he pressed open as he bobbed up and down on Pete’s cock. Oh, yeah, he was a wicked cocksucker all right. His lips were sealed around the shaft, but his tongue danced inside the dark, wet cave his mouth had made around the heated flesh as he rose and fell. It felt so good. It felt. There was a pulse rising inside of Pete, a pulse that climbed along on top of his orgasm, but it had nothing to do with semen. It had barely anything to do with sex. It was something inside him which had been dark and quiet, a limpid pool, and now it was a stormy sea, cresting and rising, reaching up and up and up—

  Wait, Pete thought, his mind feeling very far away. I don’t even know what a limpid pool is.

  And on the heels of this realization came another thought: Who is this, rising inside of me?

  He knew a moment of panic. And then the pleasure of Clarke’s fucking and Ara’s sucking overwhelmed him, and he shivered, and shuddered, and came. He flooded the ghost’s mouth with semen.

  And the something that had been rising inside him lifted, rose, and sailed easily out of his body, taking Pete along with it. He rose like mist from his own body, a soul, a spirit, a ghost himself—he didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. He was up. He was out. That was what mattered.

  Move. He had to move.

  There were bodies below him, ripe with sweat and sex, but they were not the bodies he sought. The room was changing again, and as it did, the bodies left as well. Pete watched as the air shifted and shimmered around him. The modern bed and end table littered with condom wrappers and beer bottles vanished. The closet faded, as did the dresser and the TV on a stand in the corner. A new room came in its place, a lens coming into focus. Pete saw a great wooden bed with quilted covers. A heavy oaken stand stood to the side, with a bowl and pitcher atop it, and a towel hung over the side. The walls were papered now in yellow above painted wainscoting. A rug was in the center of the room.

  A young man was lying on the bed.

  Ara.

  He was no ghost here. There was a life about him that drew Pete closer. Such a handsome young man. Ara looked as if he might be seventeen at best, and he was dressed just as the ghost had been. His dark hair still spiked in all directions, unruly, untidy. His shirt was unbuttoned, as were the buttons of his trousers. His knees were bent, his legs spread open as he stared up at the ceiling near the space where Pete was, his eyes glazed with passion as he touched himself.

  “Michael,” he whispered as if the name were a prayer. He stroked again, then shut his eyes. “Oh, Michael.”

  Pete watched as the young man came. He watched as, when finished, Ara lay there, his fingers splaying in the semen on his stomach, his eyes still shut in pleasure. Eventually he rose and cleaned himself, but not with the towel at the basin. He used a rag he kept tucked under the mattress, and when he was finished, he tucked it back again.

  Righting his clothes, he headed for the door and into the hall. Pete followed.

  It was a bright, sunny morning in the house. The hallway which had filled Pete with such dread before was now bright and cheerful, and there were people moving through it. Servants, Pete thought. Most of them were black. Ara was polite to them, but distant, and he hurried down the stairs toward the dining room.

  Clarke was waiting there, and when Ara came in, he smiled.

  Pete watched Clarke carefully as Ara helped himself to food from a sideboard and then sat down. Clarke was dressed in the same old-fashioned clothes as Ara, except he wore a suit coat as well and had an ornate neck tie knotted at his throat. As Ara had come into the room, Clarke had smiled politely. But he’d lit up, too, and when Ara’s back was turned, he gazed with longing at the slope of the young man’s back and tugged absently at the knotted tie. By the time Ara turned around again, however, Clarke had recovered himself completely and was focused on his plate of bacon and eggs.

  “Are you ready for your lessons today, Peter?” Clarke asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Ara said. He wasn’t bothering to hide his longing.

  Clarke nodded and picked up his mug of coffee. “Excellent. We’ll begin in the library. But first I thought we might take a stroll down to the lake. You could do with some exercise.

  Ara looked as if he’d just been told Christmas was coming early. His face, already bright, lit up even more. “Oh yes—thank you, sir.”

  Clarke smiled, then wiped at the gesture with his napkin. “Don’t thank me yet. You’ll be quizzed on flora and fauna on the way.”

  Ara didn’t seem to mind.

  Pete, still hovering in the doorway, settled in to watch.

  There was a lot to see. Time seemed to ebb and flow around him as he followed the pair out the back door, down through the woods to the edge of the lake and back to the house again. He followed them through weeks on high speed, seeing what only the invisible can see: how enamored each was with the other. At night Clarke would masturbate with the same intensity as Ara, except he whispered Pete’s name. Peter. Which was what, Pete understood, Ara had been called when he was alive. Peter Underwood, the son of the master of the house. And Clarke was Michael Emery, the tutor hired to teach him. Peter Underwood was in love with Michael Emery and was clearly trying, without having to use words, to tell him so. Michael Emery loved him back—it was clear from his tenderness with the young man as well as the passion with which he cried out his name as he came. But Clarke—Emery—it was muddling in Pete’s mind—would not act on his feelings. Some of it was because he was a teacher.

  Most of it, Pete knew, was because of the
father.

  Mr. Underwood was hardly present in the house, but when he was, it wasn’t good. Pete followed him for a while and soon learned all he needed to know. Carl Underwood was a sick man. He was vicious to the kitchen staff, and one visit to what he’d done to the field slaves had been enough for Pete. Carl beat his son, but carefully, leaving no marks and only the most discreet of bruises. Pete didn’t get to see this part. Carl would take his son into his room at night or during the day into the tutor’s room if the tutor was gone, but Pete could not follow there. But when Peter Underwood came out, he looked miserable and spent, and when he undressed in his room, he was bruised and sore. Pete got the sense that the abuse had been less since the tutor had come, but the beatings still happened. It hurt Pete to watch, even though he couldn’t see the act, but it seemed to hurt him more than it hurt Peter Underwood to bear both the blows and the words. The young man simply endured it all.

  There was no mother, and no one ever spoke of her. Pete had the sense that she had run away. He couldn’t blame her.

  The tutor, Pete learned, had been hired to “make a man” of the boy, but from the gossip of the servants it was clear this was some outside pressure, and Pete suspected it was the dictate of an aunt who sometimes visited and gave Carl strict scoldings. After she left, the beatings he gave his son were usually the worst.

  Then one day the tutor found out about the beatings.

  The scenes from the past usually flew by, churning like strange colors across water, but when the eddies slowed, Pete paid close attention. In this image, tutor and student were working in the library. Emery put his hand on young Peter’s back to soothe him as he struggled with some problem laid before him, and Peter cried out. The dialog was hushed from where Pete watched, and time started shifting again, rushing and slowing in waves, but the end result was that Emery suspected the truth, Peter tried to hide it, and somehow this ended with Emery ordering Peter to undo his shirt and his braces and show him his back. Emery had cried out at the sight of the bruises there.

  Peter had taken hold of his tutor’s hand and placed it squarely in the center of his own naked chest. There was a brief pause, the weight of the moment hanging in the air. And then time advanced, and soon Pete watched the pair of them writhing on the rug, mouths locked.

  Young Peter was the aggressor. It began in that library, but took days to play out: Emery still clung to his nobility, but Peter wore him down. It wasn’t long before Emery was locking the door and backing against it, shuddering in forbidden pleasure as Peter claimed a suckle at his tutor’s cock as a reward for lessons well-completed. The walks down to the lake turned into trysts in the grass. And Pete liked to watch. As a ghost, he appreciated the sex, but his real pleasure came in watching their play with one another. Yes, it ended with Peter naked and kneeling on all fours as Emery thrust into him from behind, but it began with the young siren leading him there, kissing him and whispering how he wanted his teacher to touch him, how much he liked the taste of his cock, of how good it felt when he filled him.

  Pete watched it all. He could not leave with Emery on the days he left Haven, but he knew enough from watching the man in his bedroom, from the letters he wrote and the diary he kept, that Peter Underwood had become his world. He was arranging college for the young man, or at least an escape from his father’s hold. He struggled between his desire to keep his lover with him and his certainty that it was wrong to do so. His love for his student was so deep that what he wanted most was to set him free. His own carnal desires were inconsequential next to this.

  Pete Eason watched it all, entranced.

  But he felt something else rising too. The waters of the past churned around him, moving faster, and he felt a current pulling from the bottom. Something was coming, something dark. Pete began to move around the house and grounds of Haven hurriedly, as if he could find it and stop it before it was too late. But he could not find it. He whirled and whirled, faster and faster and faster, moving like light now, he streaked so fast, playing the past over and over and over as the walls of the house pushed in closer and closer around him.

  But it was no use. No matter how he moved, no matter how he searched, the water kept churning, pulling him down, and the walls of the house cried out and split in agony as he went down, and down, and down—

  —and then he was back in his body, his shoulders pinned back to the floor as Ara leaned over him, his dark eyes full of worry as he begged Pete, please, please to stop screaming.

  Mike stood at the end of the bed with his hands in his pockets and waited.

  Pete lay on the bed before him, propped up by pillows, attended by the soothing whispers and gentle touches of the ghost. The ghost, he reminded himself once more. Not “the boy.”

  The ghost wasn’t focused on Mike; it was too busy taking care of Pete. It had taken some doing for the specter to get Pete onto the bed, because first it had to defuse the alarm Pete had felt at the room, which he said had “changed again.” Mike had wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but a professional instinct told him to keep quiet. He did, and he waited, watching Peter Eason’s every move.

  There was little left of the taciturn, dismissive man who had stood in the living room and joked about leprechauns. Pete was agitated and pale, and it had to be an illusion, but he looked thinner and slighter. The shadows in the room made his hair seem darker. The curtains were drawn tight against the windows, and it might as well have been night outside for as dark as it was in here. A small lamp cast incandescent light over the faded dusty quilt and the rough hem of Pete’s jeans and button-down shirt. His cap had come off somewhere, and his curly hair had straightened, going dark and spiky.

  Mike frowned, thinking that didn’t quite make sense.

  But Pete was looking down at himself in alarm. “Oh God. I’m wearing his clothes. Fuck—I’m turning into him!” He turned to the ghost, looking sick. “I’m turning into you.”

  “It’s reaching out to you,” the ghost said, trying to rub soothingly at Pete’s shoulder, but mostly it was clutching at his shirt. “You have to resist, Peter.”

  “I saw it,” Pete said, looking down at his hands. “The past. I saw Peter Underwood. I saw them. I saw it all.” He looked back at the ghost, terror in his eyes. “I felt it coming. The bad thing.”

  “Push it away,” the ghost whispered.

  Mike could keep quiet no longer. “Pete, you’re remembering a past life. This is all perfectly natural. You have nothing to fear.”

  “Fuck you,” Pete said, turning on him. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew it was going to do this to me. You stupid piece of shit! I wish all you’d wanted was a fuck. God damn, but I wish it.”

  Mike tried to shutter himself. “Pete, what happened just now, on the floor—that was just my weakness—”

  Pete’s laugh was dark. “Jesus. Ara, you’re right, he doesn’t fucking change. That’s the same shit he said to you, isn’t it?”

  Mike blinked, confused.

  “He doesn’t know,” the ghost said to Pete, sounding sad. “He never knows who he is. Don’t bother trying to convince him. It won’t work.”

  “I’ll fucking make it work,” Pete said.

  Mike was beginning to feel uneasy. “This isn’t my past,” he said, trying to be gentle. “I’m just a researcher, an academic. This is an old case, one of high intensity, and I—”

  “Shut up.” Pete rode over his protests, aiming a shaking finger at him. “Just shut the fuck up. You’re the tutor, you dumbass.” When Mike drew back in alarm and started to sputter, Pete drove on, merciless. “I saw you. I watched it all, and it’s you. His name was even Michael. Michael Emery.”

  “Just because our names—” Mike began, but Pete leaned forward, red-faced in his fury.

  “It was you. You sat up in that room and jerked off the same way he did. And eventually you kissed him and sucked him and fucked him and even taught him how to fuck you. Not that he needed teaching. Jesus, you’re thick. You think you’re lead
ing this dance, but you’re not. You think you’re controlling this, think you’re impartial, but you aren’t. You’re as neck-deep in this as I am.”

  It was all nonsense, but suddenly Mike felt ill and exposed. “No,” he whispered. “No.”

  Pete turned to the ghost. “You keep saying ‘he always’. What do you mean?”

  The ghost cast a sad glance at Mike. “He comes back. Every time he is reborn, he comes back to try and save me. He buys the house. Usually he comes with a family, though he always ends up here a bachelor. But it always ends the same.” The ghost’s tone indicated this end was never good.

  Mike tried to give a calming, belittling smile, but inside he was reeling. He was not the tutor. He couldn’t be.

  Because if he were—

  The ghost looked thoughtful. “He’s unsettled. That, Peter, has never happened before. Not like this.”